


A Kicking Horse on a Crooked Road

by Arevhat



Category: Constantine (TV), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Magic, Non-Linear Narrative, Origin Story, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25504330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arevhat/pseuds/Arevhat
Summary: Mazikeen has been in Los Angeles for four years when she comes undone.Or "I guess I owe you for Maze." "Yeah, you do."
Relationships: John Constantine & Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), John Constantine & Mazikeen (Lucifer TV), John Constantine/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), John Constantine/Mazikeen (Lucifer TV), Mazikeen & Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Mazikeen/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	A Kicking Horse on a Crooked Road

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first draft of this after the Lucifer scene during Crisis on Infinite Earths and pondering the "I owe you for Maze" line. I'm working in a bit of the comics and putting a twist on the show mythology. It was originally a very different story - focused on Lucifer and John, and maybe I will eventually write their side of things - but this is Mazikeen's story and I wanted to tell it from her point of view. I hope that it works. If you enjoy it, a kudos or comment would be very much appreciated!

Mazikeen has been in Los Angeles for four years when she comes undone. There’s been something small and restless inside her since her first night on Earth, something too small to remember when it isn’t still, caught for a moment between her breath and her heartbeat; and it isn’t homesickness after all, she thinks as it unfurls, fading into every part of her. It isn’t frustration or the slow burn of her resentment. This is something else.

It’s soft and insistent, the way it licks under her skin and sinks into bone. It lies still for one breath, then two, and then her skin isn’t her skin anymore as it pulls itself from her like the candy floss you’d buy at the pier, sticky pink clouds over a sea of red; and it’s so absurd, so deliciously macabre, she can’t help but laugh.

The sound she makes is strange. She raises her hands to her splintered throat, her finger-bones bright beneath her vanishing flesh. “Lucifer,” Mazikeen says with what’s left of her mouth. “ _Lucifer._ ”

He sees her and surges over the bar and across the room in one smooth motion. Maybe if he had his wings he could have made it, she thinks. Maybe if he hadn’t asked so much of her he could have flown her into Hell and they would both be whole. But it’s too late for that. There’s a flash of panic in his eyes as his hands close on empty space, on her empty clothes and a bit of bone. Her last thought is one of anger.

*

There was supposed to be nothing. And maybe, for a time, there was.

*

She stirs, heavy with something like sleep.

There’s a man whispering, a wordless sigh pressing against the edges of her consciousness, but she will not let him in. She will not listen. She does not have to.

She is made of earth too.

She burrows deeper into herself, into her mother. Lilith is endless, thick with desire, dark as the sky.

 _You shine so bright_ , Lilith says. Her fingers paint signs and symbols on her daughter’s skin with the blood-soaked earth. She teems with expectations. _My beautiful, terrible girl._

Mazikeen feels herself flicker like flame, and lets herself go out.

*

There was supposed to be nothing. But 

there’s a man whispering, a sigh the shape of her name and

_mazikeen_

she knows him now, this man, this _exorcist_ , and she’d bare her teeth, but

_mazikeen_

_profugo spiritus audite me_

does she have teeth, here, or

_mazikeen in nomine lucifer ego praecipio tibi_

is she only teeth?

She opens her mouth and swallows him whole.

*

There hadn’t been pain as she stood in Lux, dissipating like mist in the morning light. There’s pain now as John Constantine pours into her, a wrenching, rending thing that reaches into what was supposed to have been nothing and pulls back all the scattered pieces of _mazikeen_ and

she’d scream as he pushes into her like pins into a dress-maker’s doll, a butterfly under glass, but there’s only space for him here, for his will and his words, the thick ozone taste of him and

she is made of hellfire and shadow, too fragile for this

but

she is made of earth, too, soaked in blood and

his words are a pulse, her pulse. So many words, Mazikeen thinks as the pain leaves her, to say one thing.

_Be._

*

There’s a swell, a surge like the sea, and she’s skin and bone again, flesh and teeth. The world is black beyond the rush of blood in her veins and the ringing in her ears and John’s mouth on hers; he exhales and smoke pools in her lungs, thick with yarrow, laced with nicotine and dandelion and the coppery taste of blood.

She’d bite but he’s already gone, breathe but it’s harder than she remembers. Her chest constricts, her heart stutters. She’ll burst, Mazikeen thinks, she’ll _drown_ , but she remembers a faded yellow sky, the heat of battle blooming on her skin. Her blades in hand, in flesh, and then the rise and curl of her blood through water shallow enough to still see the sky, to be a stupid way to die.

She’d come to on a hill above the fray, on her hands and knees as she emptied herself of the sea beneath the windswept span of Lucifer’s wings. His hands were on her waist, in her hair, and she should have been furious, _dangerous_ , he should have been _afraid,_ but she couldn’t do anything but tremble, her teeth rattling in her head. He’d laid a hand over her heart and said, _breathe_ , and

and

the exchange of smoke for air is slow and deliberate, the air like honey in her lungs, her mouth, her eyes; and it tastes like her sisters, she thinks, like morning glory and viscera and drunken cups of tea, like her brothers whose reflections were never their own.

Like home.

*

After the war, she has no home.

Mazikeen is one of the last to come to Lucifer, brittle and venomous, everything she knows ground into dust. She says she won’t swear fealty to him and he says he doesn’t care. The demons surrounding him are little tittering things, their horns clacking together. Mazikeen is so exhausted that the five of them bleed into one, a whorl of eyes and teeth and feathers.

“I’ll kill you then,” Mazikeen says.

Lucifer smiles and she thinks she’d like to smash his stupid face until there isn’t anything left of it, either.

*

The demon that half-drags, half-carries her away – not to a cell, as she expects, but to a room with a copper bath and a fireplace and a soft bed – tells her she’ll like it here, that Lucifer is a good king, a fair king, a better king than the First.

“There are no good kings,” Mazikeen says.

The demon, who is twice her height with skin like moss and spikes that rise from his limbs and tail like forgotten monoliths, shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Well,” he says. “Well, I think if you –”

Mazikeen screams at him to get out, and sleeps on the floor.

*

Hell is colder than she’d thought it’d be, and darker, but Mazikeen misses the stars more than the sun. She wraps herself in furs and drinks her spirits hot and pretends she wouldn’t fit in here even if she wanted to.

It would be easy to want to. She likes the way it smells, cool and clean, like cypress after the rain. She likes the Hellborn demons, who are more like the Lilim than she’d been told. She likes her soft bed, even if every pale grey morning she lies in it and thinks about how soft she’s become.

But most of all she likes the way she feels rooted in and fed by Hell itself, like a mushroom sprouting on a fallen tree. She isn’t the only Lilim here but none of the others will speak to her, so she scans their faces from a distance and thinks _do you feel it too?_

*

Mazikeen asks after her father but there are only two stories of Ophur, the one of his death and the one she already knows. She asks Tef to tell her the second anyway, as Ophur had once told it to him; in the firelight Tef’s mossy skin looks almost like scales.

“I wear my daughter’s kiss as I would any wound sustained in battle,” Tef says at the close, and this part is new to her. “With pride.”

Tef holds out his hand with its phantom scar for all to see and Mazikeen remembers her own pride as Ophur’s flesh had given way to wood. Her father’s blood had run down over her hand, dried sticky and tight, rubbed off bit by bit onto everything she’d touched.

“Someday,” Tef says, quieter than she expects, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Someday all will fear the little monster who stabbed me.”


End file.
